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Thursday, June 30, 2016

One of the most sterile debates that goes on in certain sections of the Anglophone media is on whether Putin is a strategist or just a tactician. There are any number of articles that debate the question with the answer usually given that he is just a tactician.

The correct answer to the question is that Putin or more correctly the Russian leadership most definitely do have a strategy, though the Anglophone media commentators who debate the question can be forgiven for always giving the wrong answer because – as their articles all too clearly show – they haven’t the least idea of what this strategy actually is. This is very surprising because Putin has explained it on many occasions.

With large numbers of Europeans in the audience at SPIEF 2016 he took the opportunity to do so again, emphasising this time the key role Europe – and specifically the European Union – plays in it….

Well they're not getting trade, but a Cold War. This is entirely the fault of the European leadership who have failed to stand up for their own interests. Maybe they can come to an arrangement where NATO is neutered and the Cold War becomes more 'pretend' than real. Then they can continue to build trade and other links.

Bringing Russia into Europe should have been the objective from the beginning, after the fall of the USSR. Unfortunately, Washington was distracted, or had other plans.

A friend of mine used to say to me it would be better if we just let Washington have the lot. I guess he was thinking that we could carry on living the same as now as middle-class Europeans while the US one percent got to own it all. But that was never going to happen as the one percent were going to use global competition to reduce wages and working conditions to increase their wealth.

I don't know what the end game will be, what sort of society there would be left? Sort of like Latin America, I guess?

The propaganda of the neoliberals is to say that you just need to work harder to get up the ladder. That this is fair competition and that good education is the answer. But these are only part truths designed to conceal the true agenda.